Fineman Laments: Obama Couldn't Make Shooting His Oklahoma City

RUSH: Howard Fineman. This is last night on MSNBC's countdown. They had a fill-in host and they talked to the Huffing and Puffington Post senior political editor Howard Fineman about Obama's Tucson speech and favorable conservative reaction to it. The guest host said to Fineman, "How is the favorable response from the right change politics going forward?"

FINEMAN: It's not gonna be any wholesale change. But I do think -- and you can tell that from what some of the other people on the right have been saying, not just Rush Limbaugh and others, they grant that the president gave a nice speech but then they say it's gonna be business as usual come tomorrow.

RUSH: So the fill-in host says, "What does it mean that Republican presidents seem to have their moments of national unity and response to some kind of external event, the shuttle, 9/11, while it seems like Democrats, Bill Clinton, Obama, have both had theirs in response to domestic political violence."

FINEMAN: What interests me now is the difference between Oklahoma City and Tucson. I started out last weekend thinking that they were very much related, but I think in the end it's different because in Oklahoma City, that was an attack on a federal office building, it was clear that the bomber had sort of political, in the broad sense, motivation for what he was doing, that it was sort of anti-governmentalism taken to a violent extreme. And I think in a way it had a lot to do with politics with Bill Clinton and the politics of the nineties. I think this is different because I think there's no evidence so far that Jared Loughner had anything political on his mind whatsoever.

RUSH: Damn it. So they had their chance, they were really hoping, they were rubbing their hands together, "Oh, gosh, this is it, this is it, this is Obama's Oklahoma... damn it, it's just nothing but a lunatic insane asylum who happens to like us. How can we paper this over? Okay, we'll blame it on rock music, yeah, conservatives like that. We'll blame it on some group called Drowning Pool. Yeah, yeah, we'll send the sheriff out there. He'll run cover for us. Damn it, damn it, damn, we were hoping for Oklahoma City, we didn't get Oklahoma City, it's not the same thing. Damn it." Another attempt blown up in smoke, speech or not, it didn't work.